UK Carbon Budget and Growth Plan Released

The details are here and the summary is:

• Energy security by moving off fossil fuels, with the emphasis on residential homes being moved off gas and vehicles off combustion engines;
• Jobs growth in clean energy industries.

The report seems very pleased with the country's progress, and confident in its ability to meet the various budget caps introduced in the Climate Change Act. It also seems inline with Climate Change Committee's 7th Budget report from Feburary.

The report seems to have been cautiously but optimistically received. No specific details at this stage.

Questions

Electrification delivers 60% of the reduction by 2040 (of which households and cars are a main share) according to the CCC (link to the report is above). So I get the focus on heat source pumps and EV's.

According to the CCC, the next most impactful area of reduction - at 22% of emissions - is in the category of 'Demand' which includes 'more efficient use of resources in industry, and improved efficiencies of high-carbon technologies, as well as some sustained shifts away from high-carbon activities, for example reductions in meat and dairy consumption and flying'.

Let's talk about flying.

Why promote the expansion of our main airports?

My quick synopsis on aviation:

1. Under the Climate Change Act, any airport expansion can only go ahead if consistent with the UK’s carbon budget.
2. Business travel is falling and the UK runs a huge tourism deficit: UK tourists spending £41 billion ($51bn) more abroad than tourists from elsewhere bring into the country. (source)
3. The CCC's advice to the government suggests no airport passenger growth until 2030 in order to meet our carbon reduction targets. We can currently support 365m passengers per year with existing capacity, currently operating around ~300m (295m in 2024).
4. The Environmental Audit Committee have already expressed deep concerns that the connection between economic growth and airport capacity is tenuous (source).
5. The expansions planned for all UK airports (3rd runway at Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, etc) would raise - if they all went ahead - a projected capacity to 529m (source).

Presumably, the current Chancellor - so determined to build economic growth at any cost - has told the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to find a way around delivering mega airports and reduce carbon emissions at the same time. It would therefore appear that we're betting on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).

SAF - essentially bio fuel from crops - can be up to 5 times more expensive than jet fuel at the moment. The policy is to ramp from 2% of jet fuel demand in 2025 to 22% in 2040. I assume the extra cost will be passed on to the passenger (good), which will definitely reduce the demand for flights (good). So why invest in the expansion of airport capacity?

But more importantly, what about the impact of trying to support aviation bio-fuels through agriculture? Not good!

• More pressure on our arable land: incentives to convert new and existing land to bio fuels;
• Destruction of bio-diversity as farms rely on yet more monocropping;
• Increase in emissions from an already fossil fuel reliant agricultural system.

In summary, we're banking on economic growth through airport expansion and air travel. It won't. We're hoping biofuel and new tech will help offset emissions from air travel. It won't. This is not good net-zero planning.

And we haven't even started talking about the other driver of demand mentioned above - diet. Nothing in the Carbon Budget and Growth Delivery Plan about this political hot-potato!